‘How?’

‘Young girls like her should not have mixed with people in public. In the time-honored Confucian tradition, they should stay at home and wait for an arranged marriage. She lost her parents when she was just a teenager, and she turned into a flower girl. Indeed, they are young fox spirits of the same-colored hair.’

Enough of hearsay about the fox spirits for one meal, Yang contemplated, and he failed to see anything wrong with a young girl struggling to support herself. He raised the last question over the cup. ‘Just one more question. Xuanji’s a renowned poetess. How can I obtain a copy of her poems? It’s for my master, who is an impossible bookworm.’

‘You may try your luck at the local temple market fair, but it’s still more than a month away – I mean the next market fair. For the moment, though,’ Bao said with a wine-sodden hiccup, ‘you may contact a typesetter/printer surnamed Mo in the town, who did a limited edition for her, I’ve heard. For reasons beyond me, the mayor also asked me about her poetry collections. There must be a lot of bookworms under the Tang Dynasty sun.’

‘That would be very helpful – the address of the typesetter, I mean.’

‘Here it is. It’s not too far away.’

‘Thank you so much, Bao. I’m afraid I have to run a couple more errands for my master, but you can take your time finishing the wine.’

Yang copied Mo’s address, paid the bill, and left the eatery with the neighborhood coordinator still burying his head in the leftovers on the table.

Again, Yang hurried back to the town, like tumbleweed rolling in the wind, and he started to feel weary with the trips back and forth between the village and the town.

Luckily, it was not too much effort to find Mo, the typesetter/printer/publisher in question.

Mo was a shrewd-looking businessman in his early sixties, who did not even ask Yang why he wanted a copy of Xuanji’s poems.

‘Yes, I did a limited edition for her,’ Mo said. ‘It’s titled Night Poetry Talk, but she took away all the copies. No more than one hundred of them.’

‘Such a small number?’

‘It’s for her men only – I mean, those special visitors to the nunnery – so the poems were written with their names mentioned in the titles, in the texts, or in the notes about the occasions of those poems. Most of the poems in the edition are fairly amorous. Not necessarily that explicit, to be fair to her. She gave them her signed copies as souvenirs – something for them to brag and boast about, and for those who had not yet had poems dedicated to them, they would hope that she might also come to write for them like that in the future. As a result, they went on showering money or gifts on her for the unique favor. After all, poetry is for thousands of autumns, and they believed their names would last forever in her lines. In the meantime, it further spread the name of her poetry parties in the nunnery. A very clever practice, I have to say, and it’s worth all the money she spent on printing.’